Saturday May 30, 2009

Dell on expansion plan despite profit slump

By DAVID TAN

GEORGE TOWN: The Dell Global Business Centre (DGBC) in Cyberjaya will continue to expand significantly this year, despite a 63% slump in Dell Inc’s profit for the first quarter ended May 1 and after Dell Malaysia implemented a voluntary separation scheme (VSS) in February.

Dell Inc’s small and medium business president Steve Felice said during a teleconference session that Malaysia continued to be an important market for Dell, and that the group would maintain a significant presence in the country.

“We are continuing to invest in Malaysia because we can tap on its human resources to grow. A prime example is the DGBC in Cyberjaya, where we are adding staff at a significant rate.

“We are now recruiting through walk-in interviews and the ‘Friends for Hire’ programme. To date we have about 680 (people) here in Cyberjaya,” he said.

The DGBC, which provides customer service support, started with 200 employees in 2007, and plans to have 1,000 staff by 2012.

On its manufacturing operations, Felice said Dell was still manufacturing substantially in Penang.

“We will continue to make changes in our supply chain management that may affect our manufacturing plants, but we are not announcing anything for the time being,” he said.

On the computer business outlook in Asia Pacific, Felice said it was hard to say which country in the region would recover first.

“It looks like China due to the fact that it is the least negatively impacted, and the government’s stimulus packages. But so far there are no signals from other parts yet,” he said.

In February, Dell Malaysia implemented a VSS package for about 5% of its 5,000 employees in Penang and Cyberjaya.

For the first fiscal quarter ended April, Dell posted US$12.3bil in revenue, down 23% compared with US$16bil achieved in the previous corresponding period.

Its net income plunged by 63% to US$290mil from US$784mil.

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